Photography by Pip Murphy-Hoyle

Content warning: depictions of racism and animal cruelty; references to domestic violence, substance abuse and antisemtism.

Every Friday since I can remember, ten minutes after the empty school bus has turned its back on the house, blowing grey smoke over tin-patched roofs with twisted antennas, my uncle’s car takes its place. He always parks with one worn tyre on the curb, right in front of our wired fence. Which isn’t fencing much. Its rusted gate swings open before anyone enters, balancing on a missing hinge. The grass is higher than it should be, curling over the top of the fence and between its gaps. The house leans inwards like it’s waiting to return to its beginnings, a dusty pile of stained wood planks and iron nails.

My uncle drives a scratched, grey hatchback from before I was born. Ugly and broken, like most things here. That’s why he knows it’s safe to park on the street. I hear its door groan and know he’s crawling over the passenger seat. I press my palms flat against the window, cooling me from my Friday excitement. I ignore the rays of afternoon sun, so hot they fused Mum’s two-toned cough drops to the carpet. He always walks the same way, like Grandpa did when he could. Small steps following an invisible line, brows furrowed like he’s scared it’ll disappear at any moment, and he’ll be lost in our front yard. With rusty bikes and headless dolls, weaving through strands of grass. In his arms is a package shaped like nothing you could imagine. Long and slightly wet. Heavy and soft. I can hear the crinkle of the butcher paper, the sizzle of a pan.

I can hear the ocean, long before he opens the door.

He opens the door.

“Hey, you.” The smell of the sea crashes through the house. Salt spray makes my eyes itch and sand tickles my toes. Dolphins and starfish and other silly things float around between us. “Hungry?”

We shuffle to the kitchen. Him following his line. Me following him. My uncle places the package on the table. He peels away the butcher paper. A fish. It’s lying on our table over a sea of cigarette butts, coffee rings and silver spoons. As he fishes for a knife through drawers and drawers, I let my fingers slide over wet scales. A cold hug. I shiver. It makes me think of Dad. Cold hugs to ease a palm-printed cheek. It stings. I run my fingers over the fish again and again.

“You wash your hands?” His question goes over my head as his fingers dig into the gill space, black nails turning red as the knife makes its way across, under, and inside the fish, tracing a worn map that leads to treasure only we can find.

The boys across the street used to torture animals. The big one would hold my hands behind my back with one fat hand and my chin down with the other. I would squirm and spit like the small kitten at my feet, whose wounds painted the hot concrete. They would make me watch as the little one would—he would—

All I see now is bricks and rocks, splattered blood across my shoes, fur and flesh stuck to my laces. It stopped when I stopped crying.

The fish is lying in half. Scales litter the floor. It smells of prison. My uncle wipes his face with a sweating hand, accidentally painting his forehead with a spot of red. I go to wipe it off, but he pushes me away.

“Look, like an Indian.” He speaks in a broken accent, moving his head like a bird.

We like the Indians, I think. They sell cigarettes on the corner and cook for days, filling the street with smells that promise gold and silk, mountains and rivers, and exotic animals I saw on a poster in my uncle’s room once. But the girl riding the elephant was naked. And the cigarettes cost a Centrelink envelope. So maybe we don’t like them.

The two halves have become five chunks. He cuts it by habit. A tattooed dad, a black-eyed mum, a silent grandpa, a smoking uncle; the last chunk, slightly smaller and oddly shaped like a loose puzzle piece, for a little girl. She keeps them all together.

“You can put the rest in the freezer.”

In reality, it’s a caged-up dad, a sleeping mum, a dead grandpa, a smoking uncle, and a little girl. Still with her wonky piece of fish.

He rifles through the litter on the table, searching for unexpected treasures like shells on the shore. He finds a cigarette with more than just the butt left. There’s always a lighter in his back pocket. Blue, with a mermaid on it; my role model growing up. Her hair, perfectly orange and long, twirling around her painted face. Red lips and blue eyes, prettier than any doll. What I liked most about her was not the shiny tail or purple shell bra, but the tattoo of a sailor etched along her arm. He lights the cigarette, and I catch a glimpse of her scratched face. Not much more left than two blue eyes and a fishy tail.

Dad looked like a sailor. Drunken and shipwrecked. He had a tattoo of a mermaid along his bicep. Her tail would ripple when he flexed and tensed. When he punched and punched and punched. Before he left for prison again, he added a swastika to her pale forehead. I stare at the fishtail in front of me, now spotted with ash.

“We’ll put it in the Ahmads’ bin.” He gives me a pirate’s smile, metal teeth gleaming like loose scales. “Bloody Arabs.” He points to the loose fish bits with his chin, still sucking the smoke out of his scavenged cigarette, and then roughly to the door with his head.

Some nights, when Mum is working, she pushes me out. Her job is very important. Businessmen brave potholes and graffiti, punctured tyres and missing windscreen wipers just to make it to our street, where they talk in hushed whispers in her bedroom under the glow of a red light. The Ahmads let me swing on their porch seat as I eat pastries folded with pistachios, waiting for her to finish her meetings. I don’t want to put it into the Ahmads’ bin.

My uncle rolls his eyes at me and twists the cigarette butt out into a fish fin. This means it’s cooking time. We substitute seasoning with last night’s dirty pan. The fish spits and hisses at my uncle; he looks like a captain commandeering the frypan. I flinch when the oil touches my skin. I think I am crying as the fish screeches. But it’s so hot, and I know sweat and tears taste the same. The first blow always hurts. I remind myself that I love fish, even if it does make me sad and scared sometimes.

Smoke fills the kitchen, but it’s not itchy and heavy like my uncle’s breath. It’s light and salty, settling over the room. The fish is silent now. I have a perfect view of the seaside. I count down the minutes until the insides turn from pink to white. I place the other two pieces in a plastic container I stole from my school bake sale. Mum didn’t give me anything sweet to bring to the sale, but she requested I take something. It still has the faded label of some other girl’s name. The container slots into the freezer beside slices of Grandpa’s last birthday cake, and the ice pack we use when Dad is on parole.

We swim through conversation. He asks me about school and friends, and TV. I ask him about tattoos and cigarettes and porn.

“What the hell do you want to know about that?”

I shrug and pass him the salt and pepper. Some kids at school were talking about it in a way that made me think it was like blowing out candles on your birthday cake, or decorating a Christmas tree.

The fish is done. A sizzling sun. Burning grains of sand. The warm eastern current. I know it won’t taste like home until it’s cold. But I’m hungry now. I want to swallow the ocean. Lick its waves off my fingertips, pull its bones from my teeth. I’m hungry for the sea. I tell him.

“Ya mum will be down soon.”

The fish sits anchored in the pan, waiting. He lights a new quarter of a cigarette. I start setting the table. We have these nice plates from before I was born with starfish on the rim. They’re chipped and broken, but they’re my favourite. My uncle has a really special one with a dolphin on it, but it’s the one he uses in the microwave, so I’m not allowed to eat off of it. He says one day, when he “kicks the habit,” I can have it. I trace my finger around the starfish on the plate; they look up at the sagging ceiling, wishing they could see the sun. The dolphin plate is still sitting in the microwave, drowning in a sticky glaze.

We wait. Cars and bikes and feet go past. Time floats around us. Another quarter cigarette. I watch my uncle, rocking back and forth on his heels, a small boat waiting to find land. Tall and withered, puffing clouds of smoke. I’m not sure what he must’ve been before I arrived. He seems born to be an uncle. No wife, no children, carried in and out of our home by the wind and the waves. He taught me how to play marbles. We used to play with crushed pieces of aluminium foil that we would smooth and round by rubbing on the concrete. He taught me how to brush my teeth properly, so they all stay in one place, even though I wish I had a mouth of silver coins too. When Dad showed me how to make a slitter by melting the back of a plastic loyalty card onto a razor blade, and Mum bought me push-up bras for my first day back to school, my uncle taught me how to tie a sailor’s knot so I wouldn’t trip over loose laces.

He sits down beside me. I hear the creaking of an old ship, or maybe a bedroom door. “Told ya.” My uncle wakes the fish with a bent fork, placing a piece on each plate.

My mermaid has joined us. Bed hair and blue eyes, a scratched-out face. Mum sits down at the table, stretching her tan frame like the horizon. I think she is beautiful, not because everyone has told me so my whole life, but just because. Every small cut and yellowed bruise, crooked painted line and faded lipstick smudge makes me stare at her in wonder. And maybe, if I keep staring, one day I will look like her.

Her voice washes over me like soft ocean foam. “Good morning, baby.”

The fish is cold. Its flesh warms my inside, basking in a tropical sun as we eat together. Pink coral grows from the mildew. Seaweed sways in the neglected yard. My uncle laughs louder than he can speak. Blue waves stretch over the asphalt hopscotch and the alleyway couch, past the juvenile centre and the closed Blockbuster. Mum smiles with her teeth. Golden sand reflects the sun brighter than needle points and silver spoons, harbouring shells of every colour. Soon she’ll yawn and ask me where her special cough drops are, but half of the vial is melted and buried within the carpet stitching. And my uncle will mention the stack of dishes that I’ll start before homework, rinsing chipped plates with water I’m not even sure we should drink. They’ll both walk away to opposite sides of the shore, forgetting me in the middle. But for now, I can see the ocean. And it looks like Friday.